What Do We Know About Diet and Health?

From TCS Daily:

Well, the latest research on the relation between nutrition and health has just been released and the fur is flying. Turns out the largest study ever done to assess the impact of a low fat diet on some of our major killer diseases has found that the diet has no effect -- no effect on heart disease, no effect on stroke, no effect on breast cancer and no effect on colon cancer.

[snip]

No matter what health-related research claims, if there is any wiggle room at all (and there usually is quite a bit when dealing with human beings) scientists will put their spins and biases on it in an effort to support what they believe to be true. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it is something that people often forget in trying to decide what the findings really mean.

What's more, when it comes to the causes of complex, multifactoral diseases like all of those examined by this research, we know much less than we think we do about why certain people get them while others don't. While nutrition may play a role, it is only one of many, many potential contributing factors.

And when it comes specifically to the links between nutrition and disease, we know even less, again because of how complex the relationships are and how many different factors are involved. Add to this the tremendous variability in individual response to various dietary components and you have a level of complexity that is not described well using 30-second MTV-like sound bytes.